The use of the hyphen in compound adjectives might be a bit tricky. For example, compound adjectives beginning with ‘well’ are generally written without a hyphen after a verb when used alone, but hyphenated before a noun they describe.

Examples:

His protruding belly showed he was well fed in prison.

His protruding belly showed he was a well-fed prisoner.

To indicate breaking of same word between a line and the next.

The manager was happy with the professional foot- baller who just joined the club.

Note: split a word in a way that is not misleading, e.g. atten-tion not atte-ntion, lea-gue not leagu-e.

To join words and prefixes.

pro-African

pre-historic

To sometimes (in British English) separate a prefix ending with a vowel from another word with the same vowel.

pre-emptive

co-operation

To write compound numbers (21 to 99).

eighty-two

forty-six

To write age or number.

Her two-year-old son.

A one-million-man match.

A group of ten-year-olds.

To represent a common second element in a list, except in the last item.

We could not ascertain the percentage, so we arranged them in two-, three-, and fourfold.